If like me you are counted among the mass of Christians in this country, you consider these seven days among the holiest of the year.

I’ve always been a great fan of the Easter season. You slog through yet another seemingly endless winter of bare trees and gray skies thinking things will never get better, and then comes along a day upon which everything turns—your mood, the season, even history itself. Flowers begin to bloom. Trees bud. Daylight stretches a little farther. Life is called forth from death. That is Easter to me.

Church will play an important role in the Coffey home this week. On Friday evening we will gather at a building in town to sing songs of a Man who was more than a man, Whose words of love and forgiveness led to His sufferings upon a cross. It will be a somber service as far as church goes. That is by design. The point will be to put our focus on the sorrows felt by Christ on that long-ago day, as well as the sadness and fear in His followers. At the service’s end, our pastor will stand before the congregation and say,

“Go from this place, for Jesus is dead.”

The sanctuary lights will then dim nearly to dark, leaving us all to feel our way out in shadow.

It’s powerful stuff.

But what will make Friday night’s service even more powerful is the one which will follow on Sunday morning, when we will all gather once more. Gone will be the sadness and the fear, all the shadows. Then will be joy and the light of day. For He is no longer dead, this Jesus. He is risen, and by His wounds we are risen as well.

That is what we believe. What I believe.

You can hold to otherwise, and that’s fine. Plenty who visit this place do not consider themselves religious at all, and I won’t begrudge them one bit. We’re all trying to make sense of this world and our place in it. Christianity is simply the way I make sense of mine.

But that’s not really the point of this piece. What’s struck me this week is the entire range of emotions Easter offers, and how that fits into much of the time we spend in this world. Two days during the Easter holiday receive the bulk of our attention—Good Friday and Easter Sunday. One a time of utter hopelessness and faith dashed, the other a day of unending joy and a hope so real and undeniable that it came to change the world. The gospel accounts share much of those two separate days. Even if you’re not a believer, I encourage you to read them. Yet I’ve often thought something missing from the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. A hole in the narrative I sometimes wish would have been filled.

We know what happened on that first Good Friday. Know what happened that first Easter Sunday. But the Bible is silent on what Jesus’s followers felt and did on the day in between.

That Saturday—that’s what I want to know.

Because when you think about it, that’s where the majority of our lives are lived. We are not so despondent that we have come to know all we once believed as worthless. Our lives do not feel devoid of purpose. Our very foundations have not been shaken. But nor are our days filled with such hope and assuredness that we feel shot through with a love beyond any this world could ever provide.

We don’t spend most of our days in the sorrow of Good Friday or the joy of Easter Sunday. No, most often we find ourselves living in the Saturday in between. Trying to figure out what to do next, what to let go of and what to hold onto. Trying, sometimes, just to get through the day.

It would be nice to know how Mary got through that day. Or Peter or John. But we don’t.

Maybe that’s on purpose, though.

You would think something as important as that Saturday would have been included in scripture. That it isn’t would suggest that maybe it isn’t important at all.

Maybe the point here is that life isn’t supposed to make sense all the time. That all of our questions and pains are here for the purpose of helping us to grow more and better. To become. It is to embrace the mystery of our lives fully and to always be searching. Our days are so often like the end of our Good Friday service at church—just a bunch of bodies groping about in shadow, searching for a way out. That isn’t such a bad thing. You never know what you’ll find while groping about in dim light, whose hand yours will brush against or who’s smile you will meet. What cause you will find to laugh.

The point of that first Saturday is an important one, I think—hang on. Always hang on. Do your work and smile and laugh and hang on.

Because Sunday’s coming.

When I was a kid, Easter wasn’t even an entire day, really.

It lasted only a couple of hours on those Sunday mornings, beginning with waking up to dive into all that candy stuffed into the basket left for me on the kitchen table and ending just a few hours later, when I walked out of church. When you’re just coming up in the world, Easter seems a little overblown.

After you’ve come up, though? Well, then things get different.

You get to that age after you find out the Easter Bunny’s just a poor man’s Santa but before you start sneaking chocolate into your own kids’ baskets, and Easter maybe dims a little more. Maybe it’s the time of year that does it. It’s springtime when Easter rolls around, and everything is new and fresh and drowned in color, and what’s on your mind is more the rising temperature than a rising Lord. You take it for granted that the Miracle happened. The stone got rolled away and the angel said Look inside and inside was empty. You hear things like that too much, sometimes it doesn’t seem so special anymore.

But then something new happens, usually once you get some age and you find that you’re starting to attend more funerals than weddings. Life takes on a different look right about then. The shine starts to wear off. You start thinking less about where you’re at and more about what’s laying on ahead.

You maybe discover what Easter means for the first time in your life.

I wouldn’t say that’s where I am personally, but I’d say it’s near enough. To me, Easter is the holiest time of the year. It’s a period to be quiet and listen—days to both despair and hope. That last point is what’s been on my mind.

For a lot of the religiously minded, Easter is really just three days rather than one. It begins on Good Friday, when we pause in our otherwise busy and stressful lives to consider this person who was both God and man, dying such a horrible death, setting himself apart from God so we would never have to ourselves. It ends the following Sunday with that empty tomb full of promise—proof enough for any believer that death has lost its sting.

It’s that Saturday that I want to talk about, though—

that Saturday between the first Good Friday and that first Easter. The day between all that despair and all that new hope. Nothing much gets said about that day, and so it’s all left to some imagination and hard thinking. I think about the Marys and the disciples, all shut up inside somewhere, hiding and grieving. I think about them all trying to hold onto a faith that maybe can’t help but be slipping away, searching for any reason at all to believe, and I think about how that seems an awful lot like what most of us feel everyday.

That first Saturday? That’s our lives.

Those hours are our years, ones spent trying to hope and understand. Trying to find the reasons behind the horrible things that happen to us all. It’s a tough thing, this business of living, especially when you put a God whose ways are so far apart from our own at the center of it. We stand in the present now just as the disciples stood in it then, and the choice we have is the same as theirs. We can look back to despair, or we can look ahead and hope. It’s a daring hope, no doubt, one that seems near to impossible. And yet that is where we all must turn, and that is what we all must cling to—that stone rolled away. That empty tomb. Because we can do without a great many things in life and still call ourselves living, but we cannot go without hope.